The most asked question we get from every client is, “How much to get to the first page?”
We are going to be totally, brutally honest.
We don’t know… it depends.
Let’s get real. We aren’t going to bullshit you. There is no one way to find out how much it’ll take it to get to page 1 or the top listing. There are many influencing factors that affect your rank. Over 10,000 just on your site alone. There is so many factors that we don’t know 100% but we want to give you the best answer we can.
Let’s dive in!
What are the main ranking factors?
Back Links
Diversity of Back Links
Looking at the data we know that links to your website are very important.
A company called Ahrefs completed a study on ranking factors and the number of unique domains linking to a page is the single most important ranking factor.
(UR or “URL Rating” measures the strength of a target URL’s backlink profile and the likelihood that the URL will rank high in Google)
In short, the most important thing you can do to boost your page is build more quality links to that specific page you’re trying to target.
What makes a good backlink?
What is the Domain Authority or Domain Rating of the link?
When we say quality links, we look at the amount and quality of links coming to your website or specific page. It is important to take not of the authority the link holds.
The authority score is a measure of 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. This means the higher the score the harder it is to achieve.
Not all links are equal
When we begin doing an audit of a site, we can will often see a website with a million links but a low domain rating on the contrary we will also see sites with a few thousand links out ranking the site with a million links.
When Google did their Penguin update, they tried to get very particular with their algorithm and are trying to ignore links that have little to no value. This means that over time low quality links have or may get phased out.
It’s important to point out that just because there is a lot of links to a websites root domain (example: snapseo.ca and no slash after) doesn’t mean the website is going to win. Link authority, strength and context of the content on that page all matter.
Let’s talk about the content on the page you’re trying to rank.
Content and On-Page:
Search Intent
There is lots of factors but if your content doesn’t match the intent of a users search it will likely not rank, or have a much harder time ranking. How to quickly determine page intent:
- In Google search your target keyword.
- Pay attention to the top results
- If blog articles come up – write a blog article. If a sales page comes up – write a sale page.
On-Page Optimization
Does the content on the page use HTML headers properly to organize content for the readers and search engines?
Content Relevance
Is the content you wrote relevant to the reader? Is the target keyword in the content of the page and is it properly optimized? Often our team of specialists will come across a page that doesn’t even have a client target keyword. We cannot rank something that’s not there.
Content Depth
How good is your content? We don’t want fluffy. Google wants to feed its users the highest quality content on the web. Creating in-depth, expertly written and original content will help get the rankings you so desire.
Technical optimization:
Page Speed
Does your page load fast? Google likes pages that load within 3 seconds. Anyone code a website but is it well optimized to deliver content to your readers and potential customers?
SSL / Encryption
Google has told us that sites that don’t have SSL or on-site encryption will be penalized. This is the “https” you see in front of a domain.
As you get close to the top of the page these factors become increasingly crucial to your rankings.
How many backlinks do I need to be on the first page?
Here is a free way to estimate the amount of back links needs to get your website to the first page.
The first step is to go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
From there type in the target keyword and an average number of links will be populated by Ahrefs.
In this example we are searching keywords for an eCommerce store but this practise remains true for any niche or keyword.
Adding you can search each ranking page and the number of domains.
You will likely notice that there is a gap between the number of links from all the listings on page 1. The reason is behind this is because it’s an average number of links.
Once we have this number it gives us an in site on how many links it would take to get us to page 1 or better yet – position zero.
What makes a quality link?
When building links, we look for quality, organically grow links. This means the website we put the link on is doing their own SEO to power their site.
Our favorite type of links are the ones we get from out reach blogging or guest posts as we like to call them. The problem is these take time and a lot of manual out reach and a lot of business do not have the time to write emails to sites that may not guarantee publiser placement.
Covering everything in an easy to read blog article would take several posts and naturally you’d have more questions, we’d be happy to building links to your website so contact our staff today to get a free, personalized link building strategy plan.
